Terese’s grip on my arm tightened. “Do you then consider yourself worth as much as the female?” the Shonkla-raa called.
“Osantra Riijkhan seemed to think so,” I said. “He offered to give the whole Terran Confederation a get-out-of-tyranny-free card if I came over to your side.”
“Is that what you offer in exchange for these Humans?”
“I’m offering to leave the train in exchange for them being allowed to join my friends in here,” I said. “Whether I’ll actually work for you is a different negotiation for a different day.”
There was another pause. Then, below the whistling of the command tone I caught the low murmur of hurried conversation in that same Fili dialect. They knew I was up to something, and were probably trying to decide whether the risk of me springing some trap was worth getting me out of the train.
Terese was clearly thinking along the same lines. “You can’t leave us,” she murmured. “If you do, they’ll get us. All of us.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, wishing I had an iota of reason for her not to. If the Shonkla-raa still hoped they could turn me, I might have enough time to find the weakness I was hoping for.
If they’d decided I wasn’t worth any more of their effort, I’d be dead thirty seconds after I stepped out onto the platform.
“We accept your offer,” the Shonkla-raa holding Losutu and Hardin called, switching back to English. “Open your barrier and come out.”
I took a deep breath. This was, I knew, very possibly the last stupid mistake I would ever make. But stupid or not, it was the only chance we had. “You’ll have to drop your command tone for a minute,” I called back. “The Spiders are wedged in the doorway. I can’t move them—they’ll need to be mobile enough to move themselves.”
There was another silence. “Shonkla-raa?” I prompted. “Come on, read the logic. You want me out there, you’ll have to drop the tone.”
“You will leave the Spiders and exit from a different door.”
“The Spiders have been ordered to keep the other doors closed,” I said. “Bayta can’t override them from the compartment here.”
“Then she may leave the compartment.”
“When hell freezes over,” I retorted. “It’s this door, or none at all. Now shut off the damn command tone.”
The Shonkla-raa snarled something I couldn’t hear. “You will have ten seconds,” he said, his voice low and dark.
“I’ll try,” I said. “But they’re pretty well wedged.”
“You will have ten seconds.”
Abruptly, the command tone stopped, leaving a sort of auditory afterimage ringing in my ears. “You heard him,” I said, tapping Sam’s globe. “Or maybe you didn’t. Whatever. Come on, time to untangle yourselves.”
And then, to my surprise, the tingling of the kwi wrapped around my hand stopped.
I threw a reflexive glance at the wall of the compartment beside me. Surely Bayta wouldn’t have deactivated the weapon now, with the defenders about to move out of the door and us at our most vulnerable. Had something happened to her?
Apparently not. A fraction of a second later, with the usual tingle, the kwi came back on.
And then went off again. And then on, and then off, and then on and then off. I lifted my hand, peering closely at the weapon, wondering if the thing was finally starting to fall apart. That would be just perfect, for us to lose our single best weapon right when we needed it most—
I frowned. The kwi wasn’t just sputtering. It was sputtering in a pattern. A bit clumsy and amateurish, but a pattern nonetheless. A pattern that Bayta didn’t know, but was probably being dictated to her by someone else in the compartment.
Someone like, say, a EuroUnion Security Service agent who’d probably been teased the entire week he and his fellow trainees were learning the aptly named Morse code.
And the message itself—
McMicking here.
The message began to repeat. Casually, I lowered my hand again, my heart thudding with new hope. Hope, and a bit of embarrassment. Of course McMicking was here—Larry Hardin was here, and McMicking was his chief troubleshooter. It only made sense that McMicking would be here with him.
And with that, we now had a genuine chance. The Spiders obviously knew about McMicking, and it was only because of the Shonkla-raa tone freezing out their system that they hadn’t been able to pass that information on to Bayta until now.
The Spiders knew, and now we knew. More importantly, the Shonkla-raa didn’t know.
Of course, the Spiders probably didn’t know what McMicking’s plan was, and I sure as hell didn’t. But whatever it was, there might be a way to help it along a little.
“Here’s the plan,” I said quietly to Terese. “Go to the compartment and tell Bayta—”
I broke off as the Shonkla-raa tone resumed, again freezing the defenders in place. “Not done,” I called, peering out through the tangle of Spider legs. “I need more time.”
“You have had all you need,” he called back.
“You want me out there or not?” I countered. “If you do, I’m going to need more time.”
The Filly’s mouth moved as he muttered something under his breath. “Ten more seconds.”
The tone again shut off. “Go back to the compartment and tell Bayta I’m going to try to get to the engine,” I told Terese as I continued helping the defenders untangle themselves. “I’ll pull out as many of the walkers as I can out from the wheels and drive mechanism. With luck, I’ll get enough of them clear that she’ll be able to get the train moving again before the Shonkla-raa can react.”
“But what about you?” Terese asked. “We can’t just leave you here.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “They want me alive, remember? You just focus on getting you and the rest of the train out of here and going for help. Bayta will know how and where to do that.”
Outside, the tone again resumed. “And take this with you,” I added, handing her the kwi. On the platform, out of Bayta’s range, the weapon would be useless to me, and I had no intention of letting the Shonkla-raa get hold of it. “Go,” I ordered, giving her a little push.
Her face was screwed up halfway to tears, but she gave a jerky nod and hurried back to the compartment. I waited until the door had closed behind her, then pulled the refrozen defenders out of the way. Taking a deep breath, I stepped outside, standing still until I felt the slight movement of air that meant the car door had irised shut behind me.
“Welcome, Frank Compton,” the Shonkla-raa holding Losutu and Hardin called, and there was no mistaking the malicious satisfaction in his voice. “We have waited for this moment for a long time. A long, long time.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Have you, now,” I said, trying to sound casual and suave, the way a proper dit-rec detective would sound under these circumstances. “It’s so nice to bring happiness into people’s lives.” I started toward him and his hostages.
And two steps later, I abruptly spun to my left and broke into a flat-out sprint.
Only to discover a double line of walkers already standing between me and the engine.
I slowed to a halt again, letting my lip twist as I looked back at the Shonkla-raa. “I seem to have been anticipated,” I said lamely.
“Did you really think such an obvious attack point would escape our notice?” the Shonkla-raa asked contemptuously. “Look also at the train cars behind you.”
I turned. About thirty of the walkers who’d retreated in that direction in the face of my earlier kwi attack were standing alertly alongside the compartment car, ready to counter any move I might make in that direction. The rest of the group, another fifteen or twenty of them, had wedged themselves into the wheels of the compartment car and the first-class coach car behind it. “You see,” the Shonkla-raa continued. “Even had you reached the engine, your efforts would have been futile.”